Feature by Julie Hale

Providing a moment of repose in our accelerated era, poetry is an enduring art. Just in time to celebrate National Poetry Month, we’re exploring three new collections that address the joys and challenges of contemporary existence with compassion, wit and linguistic ingenuity.

Feature by Julie Hale

For National Poetry Month, we’re highlighing new collections from four American poets that offer fresh insights into the state of the nation. These visionary writers provide unique perspectives on both inner and outer conflicts: the horrors of war, the decline of the environment, the challenges of relationships.

Feature by Julie Hale

The past is packed with remarkable women whose achievements deserve special recognition. Just in time for Women’s History Month, three new books provide in-depth looks at a few of the courageous, far-sighted women who served as early champions of change. Inspiring narratives about friendship, kinship and the quest for equality, these compelling books salute a group of winning women who were ahead of their time.

Feature by Julie Hale

Best-of collections and one-of-a-kind compilations are as abundant as twinkling lights this time of year, and we’ve rounded up a few of the best new volumes. Mysteries, poetry, witticisms, mythology and more—there’s something for all kinds of readers.Whether writing about the intrusiveness of email or the futility of the war we all wage against aging, Nora Ephron infused her...

Feature by Julie Hale

National Poetry Month is a time for applauding poetry’s unique appeal—its capacity to surprise and move us, to show us the world in new ways. The new collections below are stellar examples of the genre’s timeless attraction.POETRY OF TRANSFORMATIONMuch like the moon, the human heart waxes and wanes—a fact that provides the foundation for Jonathan Galassi’s...

Feature by Julie Hale

Books—especially great ones—beget other books. If you don’t believe it, check out the selections that follow. Providing new perspectives on past works, these critical studies, appreciations and fresh editions prove that classic pieces of literature are inexhaustible. Just right for the writer or devoted reader on your holiday gift list, the books below will make any...

Feature by Julie Hale

Whether you’re shopping for a serious scholar or an armchair academic, a mystery addict or a collector, we have a title for every bibliophile on your list. Stuff a stocking with one of the books below, and you’ll look smart this holiday season. INSIGHTS OF A FAMOUS WIFE Offering the inside scoop, so to speak, on what it’s like to live with a moody, complicated genius, The...

The world made new

That Little Something, the 18th collection from U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, is a volume of brief, informal poems that feel effortlessly composed and poignantly chronicle the loneliness of the human condition. Simic's poems are populated by observers and outsiders - solitary figures who are ill at ease in the world. In melancholy portraits of isolation like "Walking" and...

Cormac McCarthy's bleak vision of the end times

It's the ultimate pairing: Cormac McCarthy plus the apocalypse. As an author who has delivered some of the darkest moments in modern fiction via books like Blood Meridian and Child of God, McCarthy seems uniquely suited to an exploration of what the world might be like at its end. With The Road, he has developed this nightmarish scenario into an affecting and compassionate novel, as an...

An isolated soul

The work of Franz Wright displays a different kind of craftsmanship. In God's Silence the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer offers looser, more spacious poems with lines less closely knit, the absorption of them as natural as respiration for the reader. Marked by melancholy and a seemingly hard-won wisdom, the collection as a whole reflects the plight of an isolated soul at odds with the unseen....